Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate. She gained international attention for her activism against the Taliban’s restrictions on girls’ education in Pakistan and was shot by the Taliban in 2012 for her work. After surviving the attack, she moved to England and co-founded the Malala Fund and continues her advocacy for girls’ right to education worldwide. Finding My Way is a memoir by Malala published in October 2025. Unlike her earlier autobiography, I Am Malala, which chronicled her public activism and the Taliban’s assassination attempt, this book focuses on her personal, private journey of self-discovery.
Malala very openly and honestly expresses her feelings when she writes:
“On a mild October afternoon, a bullet changed the trajectory of my life, cutting me off from my home, my friends, and everything I loved, spinning me out into an unfamiliar world. At fifteen years old, I hadn’t had time to figure out who I wanted to be when, suddenly, everyone wanted to tell me who I was. An inspiration, a hero, an activist. But also a wallflower, a punching bag, a paycheck. To my parents, I was an obedient daughter. To my friends, a good listener. When I was alone, I unraveled—because the hardest thing to be was myself.”
A key theme of the book is Malala’s struggle to find her own identity while carrying the weight of public expectations, anxiety and PTSD
The memoir analyses Malala’s time at Oxford, her college experiences are sometimes told in minute detail, we are introduced to all her close set of friends – Zayan, Hen, Cora, Yasmin, Anisa – and told of an early romantic relationship with a Moroccan Muslim. The novel is relatable, and there are many light moments, such as nearly failing exams because she was travelling so much for conferences and work and also being ‘ghosted,’ which only goes to show that even a Nobel laureate is fallible and human like the rest of us. It’s good to know that through it all Malala thoroughly enjoyed her time at Oxford as a young girl making friends. As she writes:
“I kept my promise to myself to enjoy as much of Oxford as possible that term. My memories from those three months are some of the happiest of my college years—dancing with Zayan at the Bollywood Bop, binge-watching Sex Education with Hen, gossiping in the kitchen until 4 a.m. with Cora and Yasmin. At the Polo Club Ball, I stood outdoors under a space heater and laughed as Anisa arrived on her horse—a cowboy in an evening gown.”
Title: Finding My Way: A Memoir
Author: Malala Yousafzai
Publisher: Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster
A key theme of the book is Malala’s struggle to find her own identity while carrying the weight of public expectations, anxiety and PTSD from her Taliban shooting. Malala openly discusses her anxiety, which is courageous of her and talks about her therapy sessions which helped her deal with it. She even discusses the fits she sometimes gets and how troubling they are for those nearest to her, especially her husband. The memoir traces her journey from a high school student to a young woman at ease with her past and at one with her global identity. The memoir is solid, strong and just goes to show that Malala has what it takes to survive all the elements and face the world with a brave face even with all that she has been through, including multiple surgeries in Boston to reconstruct her face.
I was especially impressed by the school she has built in Swat for young girls with the Nobel Prize money and is running it well through the Malala Fund. About returning back to Swat after five years she writes very philosophically:
“Everyone was quiet on the flight back to Islamabad. My mind drifted to a bit of philosophy I’d recently read, attributed to the ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus: “No man can step in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” The idea, as I understood it, is that people and places are always changing, and that these changes are vital to our existence. Without the constant flow of water, the river cannot survive.
The trip helped to heal the disorientation that I had experienced over the previous five years. Pakistan was not “before” and England was not “after,” but parts of an ongoing story. My country, family, and friends were no longer memories that I had to look backward to see; now they were the future too—people and places I could return to again and again.”
Finally, the memoir also examines her romance with Asser Malik, whom she met in Birmingham and later married in 2021. She explains in story and text messages form, how her earlier philosophical opposition to marriage changed, and she found “true love.”
Finding My Way, in my opinion, is an honest account of a young girl’s life. How she’s venturing on the global stage and finding friends and love both. It’s easy to criticise, it’s difficult to do the work Malala is doing with the Malala Fund. Kudos to her for her resilience and bravery. Not that just, that novel is written is understandable English so it was a very comfortable and warm, easy read. As for me, I appreciate and respect Malala and wish her best of luck in her future endeavours.
